Elias Hicks: Let Brotherly Love Continue [1824]

This video dramatizes the liberation theology of Walt Whitman's principal hero: his former neighbor and family friend, Elias Hicks [1748--1830]. It reveals Friend Hicks as Whitman saw him. Quaker history has so far only recognized two causes of the epochal Hicksite Schism: a shift towards fundamentalism and a struggle over Meeting governance. I discovered that the sexual implications of Hicks' insistence on the Inner Light were a third cause. That controversy was so incendiary, however, that it disappeared from Quaker journals two years after Hicks' death in 1830. The matter is much too nuanced and complicated to be covered in the video, but will be presented beneath this video in a web page at

Elias Hicks,Quakers,Quakerism,Hicksite Schism,Perfectionist Theology,Quaker Theology,Quaker History,Walt Whitman,Walt Whitman's Influences,Free Love Movement,Let Brotherly Love Continue,History of Sexuality,Gay History,Long Island History,Leaves of Grass,LeavesofGrass.Org,Mitchell Santine Gould,